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BioShock Infinite Hit With Second Delay, Now Launching March 26th

Irrational Games announced this morning that BioShock Infinite has been pushed back from its February 26th release date — which was itself a delay from the game’s original release window of October 2012 — and will now launch on March 26, 2013.

Ken Levine (Irrational Games’ boss) made the announcement during a press preview event, explaining that the extra month will be used for “polish and bug fixing”. Levine’s exact comment concerning BioShock Infinite‘s delay reads:

“When Rod Fergusson [former Gears of War franchise director at Epic Games] came on board we looked at the game… He was there for about a month and he said, ‘look, I’ve been looking at the schedule and looking at the game and frankly you could really benefit from another three or four more weeks for polish and bug fixing.'”

“We talked about it. I knew I’d probably get beat up in the press a little bit about it. But at the end of the day, if it’s going to make a better game we’re going to do it.

“So the new date is March 26. That’s my bad news.”

Speaking to EuroGamer, Levine also commented on recent reports stating the August 2012 staff departures of development director Tim Gerritsen and art director Nate Wells were signs that BioShock Infinite‘s development was in trouble. Levine noted that these changes in staff were nothing more than normal employee turnover that happens at every company.

“In terms of people leaving, I wish I had exciting stories to tell you, but you’ve worked at companies, people come and people go. Because there was so little news about the game… the reason there’s little news about the game is, we’ve really felt we showed what the game was at E3 last year. It was very representative of what our vision for the game was. We didn’t see a point in constantly going out and beating the same drum because what were we going to say at that point besides, here, play it?”

Finally, Levine took the opportunity to correct media reports that claimed the multiplayer modes for BioShock Infinite had been cut from the game. It turns out that the studio had only ever looked into the possibility of including multiplayer, and in the end decided against it. According to Levine, the multiplayer modes in the game were never cut because they had never been confirmed in the first place.